Ask HN: RedHat for Personal Use

26 points·bozdemir··6 comments

I wonder if there is a benefit of using RHEL for personal/indiviual use for computer vision/machine learning tasks? Thank you.

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For computer vision and ML work specifically, RHEL doesn't give you much advantage over Ubuntu or even Fedora for personal use. Most ML tooling like PyTorch, CUDA drivers, Jupyter is better supported and easier to set up on Ubuntu, and the community resources are much larger.

if you want something RHEL-adjacent without the overhead, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux give you the same base for free and are worth a look.

RHEL trades convince for predictability. That's valueable in teams, less so when you are solo and iterating quickly.

Why RHEL and not just Fedora? Or if you value stability - then maybe Ubuntu or one of its derivatives like Pop_OS?

Not really.

CV/ML takes a lot of resources, so If you wanted to have an advantage by choosing a certain linux distro, I'd suggest one that sets up a super minimal system.

In reality, choose any distro. Want suggestions? Then perhaps linux mint If you are new to linux.

I have been using debian and ubuntu together on different systems, and I wanted to know if I can do things more efficiently, ubuntu distro bloat is real, but when I try to use Debian, it is coming from behind on drivers and packages. I appreciate any suggestions.

The default Debian version is focused on stability, so you'll only find battle-tested releases in it. That's why it's called "stable", if you're feeling more adventurous than that, you could try "testing" or even "unstable". 20+ years ago I daily drived an unstable desktop. At that time it had literally what was released hours ago, but you were always risking it to stop working after any update. You should check these versions if you like Debian.

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